House of Kwa

by Mimi Kwa

  I can tell that Aunty Theresa is flabbergasted by Aunty Clara’s visit. Still, she speaks no ill to me of her badly behaved sister. Perhaps to Theresa, what she and all her siblings have been through is more than enough reason for a little madness.

  That night, Aunty sings to me as Brigit tucks me in. I’ve reclaimed the sofa bed in Aunty’s mahogany study, where, surrounded by ivory and jade statuettes, I lie on plush, tasselled velvet cushions, snuggled under a featherdown covered in embroidered silk.

  Brigit’s small, plain room with her small, plain bed is just on the other side of the wall.

  Aunty sings the Doris Day song ‘Que Sera, Sera’ as I drift off to sleep. She loves singing me this carefree song about letting go of trying to control everything in your life. When she sings it my worries disappear. We can’t control or predict the future – we can only resist or surrender and, either way, what will happen will just happen.

  There’s a sense of calm tonight in Peace Mansion. This is the only world I need, and I wish I could live in it forever.

  Back at Mandarin Gardens, I receive a letter from Aunty Theresa every few weeks. But one day when I check the letter box, I see her handwriting on a letter addressed to Dad, so I take it to him.

  It is so terrible, she writes. Patrick and Elaine need to get out. They have two daughters. You can help them. I will pay for you to go. I think you can get them out.

  When Kwa blood calls, there is no refusing it. Dad announces he is going to ‘rescue’ some Chinese relatives from the Communist party in China and he will bring them back to Perth. He prepares sponsorship documents to bring his half-brother’s family to Australia, then flies to Beijing to meet the Kwa family of four – Elaine and Patrick and their two daughters, Gar Ping and Gar Hong. The girls’ Western names are Karen and Cathy. Patrick is eleventh brother and son of Grandfather Ying Kam’s wife number two. In other words, Patrick is Dad’s half-brother.

  During the Cultural Revolution in China, art and artefacts were defaced and destroyed because they represented the ‘old way of thinking’. Patrick and Elaine and their neighbours hid Chinese art under the floorboards and behind false walls, but the Red Army unearthed most of it and set it alight. Patrick and Elaine have only a few pieces left.

  Francis arrives in China carrying an almost empty suitcase with a false bottom.

  He and Patrick meet for the first time since they were boys. Francis meets his past; Patrick meets his future. Francis asks for the art, and stuffs the ‘priceless’ paintings into the false bottom of his suitcase, covering them over and praying they won’t be detected. Not much escapes the Cultural Revolution, and the penalty would be long-term imprisonment, even death, a far greater cost than the paintings are worth. Francis takes the risk anyway, and returns home with the artworks, having lodged the migration documents with the Australian authorities.

  Very soon, the family’s visas come through and, as promised, they move to Australia, staying in our Scarborough house for a time while they try to adjust to the new language and culture. Patrick and Elaine are so grateful they cry tears of relief.

  WOMBLES AND GOOSEDOWN

  I HAVE A FEW FRIENDS AT SCHOOL – I’VE WORKED HARD TO make them – but I’m not often allowed to have them over. Meanwhile, Dad has been renting out our next-door duplex to a string of temporary tenants, and he says their kids ‘have to’ play with me because I am the ‘landlord’s daughter’, so I share my swing set and trampoline with these children passing through. Sometimes they seem to like me, sometimes the opposite, and I try not to get attached either way because they always leave me.

  More reliable, I find, are characters in books and on TV shows. They are always there for me. I’m particularly fond of a grey-haired bunch of chilled-out mole-like creatures who walk on their hind legs and forage through rubbish, having wonderful adventures wherever they go. The Wombles is my favourite show; I have the picture books too. They are a happy part of my life – the opening soundtrack has me running to the television every time.

  I was born into a kind of Womble family, with pathological hoarders on both sides. Yes, pathological, I’m talking TV documentary level. Hoarding will one day be recognised as a psychological disorder, but in the 1980s we call this extreme behaviour ‘eccentric’.

  The local council’s hard rubbish day is a special event for Dad. Anything kerbside is fair game – bad luck if you rested something against your front fence while you went inside for a moment, because it won’t be there when you come back if Francis Kwa was driving down your street.

  I help Dad hook up a trailer to our station wagon, and off we go, bobbing up and down on the vinyl seats, on the lookout for stuff, any stuff. You just never know what will come in handy when you’re a Womble. ‘Keep your eyes peel,’ Dad says. His favourite cautionary tale is that if we don’t keep our eyes peeled, who knows what precious junk – I mean gems – we will miss.

  Scraps of metal, broken microwaves and kettles, toys and bikes beyond repair, and building materials – especially building materials – all get loaded onto our trailer. Dad has a meticulous mad-scientist sort of way to classify nuts, bolts, nails, pipes, poles and planks, so he can keep them forever, ‘just in case’. He also collects old furniture: couches, dressers, drawers, even skanky mattresses. ‘You never know,’ he says when I protest about having to haul items three times my size onto the trailer, ‘we may need them one day.’

  Our property is about four and a half thousand square metres, amply sized for excessive storage.

  I help him haul steel pipes and splintered wood in from the trailer as I wonder if this is a metaphor for some major void in my father, a hole in his heart, perhaps a result of the years lacking love from his parents or of the childhood he had, what he saw and what he lost. A chasm in a dragon, so hungry that no pile of loot can ever be enough. He’s the dragon in Lord of the Rings lying atop a mountain of treasure, guarding it with his life.

  Dad commits to memory a blueprint of what sits on every shelf, what’s stacked in every corner, what’s wedged into every crevice of every shed, mezzanine and rooftop. When I air my concerns over the ever-growing junk mounds cluttering up our lives, he snaps tersely, ‘Iiiiiiiiii neeeeeeeeeed it.’ Then he gathers his patience, explaining slowly and deliberately that I’m ‘just a kid’ and ‘don’t understand’.

  Sunflowers cover a quarter acre of our land. They’re taller than me, their beautiful faces turned towards the sun, their stems thick skinned and strong, hardy armour in scorching heat and torrential rain. Even as a child I have no delusions these friends – as I’ve grown to regard them – will stay either, as it won’t be long before Dad concretes over them with his dreams. The flowers stand in rows, stoic warriors. They shield me from the dragon as I hide among them; their rough leaves make it far too uncomfortable to stay all afternoon in the cool shade, but I have peace for a while. I am a tiger cub. I curl up and close my eyes.

  Later on, Dad and I shoot tin cans off the rail of a fence between our garden and the sunflower patch, the petalled warriors unmoved by the danger.

  Dad shows me how to load his rifle, then he aims and fires, missing the cans. A bullet sails into the yellow distance. ‘I’m going to build a hotel there,’ he tells me as he reloads. ‘I’m going to build a hotel, and we will be rich.’

  He hands me the rifle. I aim and fire at the cans and miss too, making a hole in the fence, the force flinging me onto my back on the ground.

  ‘Buddy hopeless,’ Dad says, laughing as he picks up the rifle, reloads, aims and fires again. Metal hits metal, making a sharp ping that gives me a fright.

  ‘I don’t really want to do this anymore, Dad,’ I say as I dust myself off and stand beside him. ‘What if we hurt someone?’

  ‘Ahahaha, always worry. Buddy hell. Worry like a woman. When I was your age, I was looking after the guns for the whole Japanese Army.’

  Dad takes his gun back to the Wombled school locker next to our Wombled ping-pong table. Once he has placed the rifle upr
ight inside, he locks the door with a rusty padlock. He returns the key to a large metal ring of twenty other keys, enough to make a prison warden green with envy. Dad has attached it to a length of elastic that retracts back to the belt loop on his jeans, so the cacophony of keys casually hangs from his waist next to his brown leather coin pouch, in which there are washers and thumbtacks as well as coins.

  Francis Kwa continues to build his dream: Mandarin Gardens, the biggest youth hostel and backpackers in the Southern Hemisphere. Past the firing-range fence and over the sunflower field, he lays slab after slab of the foundation for his hotel, along with more sheds.

  My favourite addition is a 25-metre swimming pool, half the length of an Olympic-sized pool. Ours is actually only twenty-three metres, but Dad says no one will ever check. I roller-skate in its concrete shell, pretending to be the figure-skater Torvill with her Olympic partner, Dean – until I fall over, grazing my knees on the rough surface.

  Then a concrete and Besser-block monster rises up from the ground. Its thirteen apartments are like Rubik’s Cubes that can be converted into various configurations to accommodate various needs: two bunks and a double, two singles and a queen, a room for a large family with a partition that swings across for two smaller families to fit. Dad has thought of everything. At Angela’s behest he even buys a Volvo like Aunty’s, only it’s a station wagon not a sedan. He puts custom KWA numberplates on it, so everyone will know who we are.

  Scarborough is as magnetic to vagrants and transients as ever, and in local slang it now has the nickname Scabs. On the Mandarin Gardens flyer, the services we provide are beyond anything a Scabs hotel has ever offered. Dad lists our amenities and services at every opportunity: on our signage, our flyers and his business cards, as well as in most conversations.

  MANDARIN GARDENS AMENITIES AND SERVICES

  (in no particular order)

  – Resident gas fitter (Dad)

  – Resident structural engineer (Dad)

  – Resident electrical engineer (Dad)

  – Legal advice (Dad)

  – Arbitration advice (Dad)

  – In-house babysitter (Me)

  – Room service (Me)

  – In-house video (pirated) (Me)

  – Kitchen facilities

  – Laundry facilities

  – Printing and office services (Me)

  – Proofreading (Me)

  – Marriage celebrant (Dad)

  – BBQ facilities

  – Trampoline

  – Table tennis

  – Playground

  – Telephone booth

  – Carparking

  – 25-metre pool

  Mandarin Gardens achieves a 4.5-star ‘Hotel’ rating under the governing Royal Automobile Club’s independent 200 criteria system. Unfortunately, we fall short of the half star for not having a restaurant. Undeterred, Francis comes up with a number of ideas to obtain this. They include assigning me to be the full-time chef, then ruling me out not because I have school to attend but because I’m not confident cooking with a wok yet, or catering for eighty people. The fact that I am only ten years old doesn’t enter into the equation. Next, in another attempt at the elusive missing half star, Francis approaches the RAC with the idea that a barbecue could qualify as a restaurant because there’s seating nearby, but his proposal is rejected.

  My dad establishes a ramshackle system where backpackers provide cleaning services in return for free accommodation or reduced rent, and I have to pick up what they don’t do or don’t do well. ‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys,’ Dad says. He loves that expression.

  Angela leaves me to-do lists, and they’re often long:

  MIMI: TO DO

  – Empty and count coins from gold phone

  – Empty and count coins from washing machine and dryer

  – Change linen U4

  – Clean U8 for guests arriving 2 pm

  – Engrave new toaster and cutlery U13

  – Scrub pool tiles

  – Wash Volvo

  – Collect rent – Bunkhouse tenants Rm4 not paid

  – Man check-in counter (take cordless phone and intercom when doing jobs so tenants can contact you)

  Once I’m done I am allowed to see my friends, but my list of chores is usually long, so most days I can’t.

  One day, after I’ve emptied the gold phone, someone yanks it off the bench in the phone box under the stairs and tries to make a dash. Dad chases them and they throw the heavy telephone at Dad, damaging his hand. One of his fingers is never the same after that. Crooked forever.

  With dozens of travellers to organise, Mandarin Gardens becomes too unwieldy for Dad, Angela and me to manage on our own, so Dad hires the first in a long line of managers. They get free accommodation and loose change for food in return for on-call attendance, twenty-four seven.

  For a time, I’m best friends with the daughter of a couple who oversee our resort, Jill and Dale. Everyone calls her Monkey because she likes climbing trees and is a tomboy. She’s a year older than me, wears dungarees and has unruly curls and equally unruly freckles. I like her right away. We play endlessly, keeping walkie-talkies permanently on us so we can stay in touch even when we’re in bed.

  One day, Monkey accidentally jumps on a rusty nail and leaps off it just as quick. Tears well in her eyes, but she doesn’t cry or complain. She is the bravest girl I know.

  Jill is a truck driver. Dale isn’t really Monkey’s dad, but she pretends he is. She says her dad didn’t want her so she prefers to live as if he never existed. One day Monkey takes a big run-up and pushes Angela into the pool. She is still the bravest girl I know.

  After that I’m banned from seeing her. Luckily, it’s hard to separate us: she lives next door, and our bedrooms share a balcony with only a partition in between. We sit back to back either side of the swinging wall, talking and telling stories.

  No one can keep us apart, until Angela fires Jill and Dale. They leave, taking Monkey with them.

  SOAP OPERA AND PHILOSOPHY

  ‘WHAT, YOU’RE GOING TO HONG KONG AGAIN?!’ MY classmates always ask in disbelief. Most of them have never been further south than Esperance or north than Bali. ‘Back to see all the Ching-Chong-Chogies,’ someone will sneer. Then the group will chant, ‘Ching-Chong-Chogie, Ching-Chong-Chogie,’ and I’ll laugh as though I’m in on the joke, not the butt of it.

  The next time I visit Hong Kong, the second time this year, Lukin isn’t there. It’s already 1986 and we’ve caught up four times since our first awkward meeting, usually playing Lego and video games or digging in and around the Peace Mansion gardens. We kept writing in between, but that’s become less frequent because his father has been transferred back home to Dubai. Lukin now flies there from his British boarding school during semester breaks, and I doubt we’ll ever see each other again. The year before, it got a bit weird when he kissed me – we were only ten. It was an innocent kiss on the cheek and would have been sweet if it hadn’t happened while I was admiring my effort to build a taller Lego tower than his. One minute he was reading an Astro Boy comic book, the next his lips were on my cheek. It kind of spoiled our friendship, but I still miss him a little.

  ‘I know!’ says Aunty, doing a hip wiggle. ‘Let’s go to the beauty parlour.’ She always thinks getting my hair and nails done will cheer me up. ‘Rukin is such sweet boy. You can stay in touch, you know. One day you could be a diplomat and he could be a diplomat and you may meet again.’

  Every year I am Aunty Theresa’s little protege for a month or so – two visits, roughly a fortnight each, sometimes more. I am like a daughter to her. Aunty really wants me to be a diplomat, but I don’t quite understand what that is. ‘You hold your head high,’ she explains. ‘You talk to people. You travel. You are like royalty. You meet royalty. I met many, many diplomats on my flights. They really do have the life. Parties and socialising. Wearing nice clothes. I was like a diplomat once. I did some translating for some important men. I was very young, my English wa
s terrible. I don’t know what they ask me, or what they are saying at all, but I’m good at pretend.’ She laughs, and I giggle. ‘Did I tell you about the elocution lessons I had with stones in my mouth?’

  We sit side by side having our nails done. I choose a lurid fluorescent pink for my fingers, while Aunty just wants her toes done – in red.

  ‘I always leave my fingernails natural. On the airline it was forbidden to have a colour. And I swim so much these days, they’d get ruined now anyway.’

  I drink in the way the salon staff defer to Aunty as if she is some kind of aristocrat, and then how quickly she puts them at ease. In no time they’re treating her like an old friend.

  ‘You know’ – she winks, and a young apprentice places a milkshake in front of me – ‘you must know how to treat people.’

  I draw the delicious vanilla-flavoured milk into my mouth through a straw.

  ‘If you smile . . .’ Aunty pauses for me to finish her sentence.

  ‘The whole world smiles with you,’ I complete the phrase, wiping a drop of milkshake from my chin.

  She grins as I fan out my fingers and blow on my wet nails.

  ‘Everyone loves you, Aunty.’

  She raises her chin and looks down her nose at me. ‘Well’ – she smiles again – ‘maybe it’s because I am interested in everybody and I do not judge them or what they tell me. Rich or poor. Important or not important. Complaining or happy. I simply say, “Is that so?”’ She laughs. ‘If the news sounds good, I smile. If it is so-so or not so good, I keep a face like this.’ She straightens up her face. ‘Serlious. Velly serlious.’

  I adjust my expression to match hers.

  ‘Many people likes to complain very much,’ she continues. ‘So I do like this.’ She nods slowly with a serious expression. ‘And I say . . .’ she pauses, and we finish the sentence together: ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Never frown,’ she tells her little shadow. She reads me Lao Tzu philosophy. ‘Never boast. Boastful people do not know how to behave.’ She teaches me Tai Chi. ‘Let the light from within you shine. Never let them know if you are upset.’ And she paints with me. ‘There are so many ways to express yourself.’